The travelling New Yorker becomes aware that this is largely local. A Southern newspaper man, writing from New York to his paper, not long ago, noted its manners with even a touch of horror. "When I saw a man sitting in a car in which a woman was standing," he says, "I knew that I was far from home." A very recent British observer, the clever author of "The Land of The Dollar," proceeding from New York to Philadelphia, recorded his refreshment at happening upon an American town where the inhabitants were not too busy, when the stranger thanked them for a piece of information, to answer "You're very welcome."
When the New Yorker goes abroad at home, he finds unwelcome confirmation of the suggestion that his own city is the most unmannerly of all. The New Englander has undoubtedly a way, as Anthony Trollope noted, of giving you a piece of information as if he were making you a present of a dollar. But for all that, the sensitive stranger finds himself much less rasped at the end of a day in Boston, than at the end of a day in New York. As you go Southward, the level of manners rises in proportion almost to the respective stages of social culture reached in the colonial times, when Josiah Quincy found in Charleston a degree of "civility" and "elegance" such as the good Bostonian recorded that he had never seen, nor expected to see, on this side of the Atlantic. One is driven, in view of the Southern courtesy, to wonder whether there may not be something in Goethe's defence of the duello, to the effect that it is more desirable that there should be some security in the community against a rude act than that all men should be secure of dying in their beds.
But this explanation does not account for the fact that in whatever direction the New Yorker goes from home he finds better manners of the road, manners of the street-car, manners of the elevator, than those he left. Western cities, unless they be Southwestern also, have not the soothing softness and deference of Southern manners, but there is in these a recognition on the part of the human brother whom you casually encounter, of your human brotherhood which you are by no means so sure of eliciting from the casual and promiscuous New Yorker. The Chicagoan will tell you in detail what you want to know, even though, as Mr. Julian Ralph has remarked, he makes you trot alongside of him on the sidewalk while he is telling it. And in an elevator in which there is a woman, the Chicagoan hats are as promptly and automatically doffed as the Bostonese, while in this regard it is New York and not Philadelphia that is the Quaker city.